Shopify Checkout is the feature to securely accept orders and take payments during the online transaction. After a customer adds products to a cart, they use your checkout to enter their shipping information and payment details, and then place their order. Due to that, it’s crucial to track user activity to analyze e-commerce metrics at these steps. Therefore, Shopify website owners used to customize “checkout.liquid” file and “additional scripts” section in Checkout settings to add 3rd party tracking codes and other necessary tags as “theme.liquid” (a.k.a index.html) doesn’t allow full-sitewide tracking including these checkout pages.
And in February 2023 Shopify announced that checkout.liquid is deprecated and moving to Checkout Extensibility mainly for security reasons, also Shopify website owners have a deadline to upgrade Thank you and Order status pages, including the apps using script tags and additional scripts until August 28, 2025. In this blog post, you can learn more about this update and the steps to follow how to upgrade your checkout pages.
What is Shopify Checkout Extensibility?
If your store is on the , then you can use Checkout Extensibility as it replaces the need for checkout.liquid and aims to make checkout customization easier for paid merchants in a way that’s app-based, upgrade-safe, higher-converting, and integrated with Shop Pay. It mainly introduces these features;
- Checkout editor
- Checkout apps from the Shopify App Store
- Shopify pixels manager
- Branding API
On the other hand, if you are in Basic Shopify plan or higher plans, some basic checkout customizability is available and some other features will be restricted. Also, there won’t be access to “Custom apps built with Shopify Functions” which means you won’t be able to create your own apps that might be quite needed for advanced tracking functionalities. Either you need to use official apps like “Google & Youtube” or paid options developed by other companies.
Benefits of upgrading to Checkout Extensibility for Store Owners
As mentioned Shopify ends the support of checkout.liquid and it will be turned off in stages. So it’s obligatory to make the update. The checkout extensibility has many new features to help shop owners provide secure, speedy and easy-to-customizable checkout steps, also helps to improve purchase journey steps to increase conversion rates for more sales with higher cart value expectations.
- Increased speed and conversion
- Integration with Shop Pay
- Powerful new checkout features
- Upgrade-safe
- Enhanced security
- Consistent buying experience
On the other hand, there are restrictions on the checkout extensibility that can be counted as the negative side of this update, and force to Shopify site owners to figure it out via alternative solutions. Customizations that require access to the parent DOM or other elements on the page, don’t work with Checkout Extensibility. Examples of types of apps that are impacted by this change include:
- Performance Monitoring
- Heatmaps
- Visitor Recording
- A/B Testing which relies on manipulating the DOM directly
How to upgrade to Checkout Extensibility?
Once you make this update, the order status page additional scripts section will be totally disabled. So, if you are using custom codes and scripts (for Google Ads, Bing Ads or Facebook etc.) it’s important to review them and make sure you won’t be losing any data with the upgrade.
Therefore, I recommend you fully understand the effect of this change, so feel free to review Checkout extensibility upgrade kit pdf and this resource which was officially published by Shopify. For any updates on your websites, you should make tests, use a dummy website and try not to publish the changes at the busiest time hours for your business. You can also decide to turn off the paid media campaigns to lower the traffic and the risk of any issues that may occur.
The first 2 steps are not directly related to Checkout Extensibility upgrade, but the settings choices might affect the app’s behavior and also improve your store functionality and customer’s journey on your site as recommended by Shopify. And these are only for the shop owners who are still using the old settings. Any customizations that you’ve made will continue to work seamlessly when you switch between checkout layouts.
Feel free to jump to Step 3 if you prefer not to do or already done these updates.
Step 1: Update customer accounts from legacy
There are two versions of Shopify customer accounts, if you are still using the legacy version and don’t have reasons to keep the current settings, it’s better to change it to the new version.
- Customer accounts is the newest version of customer accounts, and lets your customers log in using a one-time 6-digit verification code sent by email. A password isn’t required to log in. They can use store credits.
- Legacy customer accounts lets your customers log in using an email and a password.
After you switch to new customer accounts feature, you can send to the existing customers “account invites” emails, so they can create new profiles.
And you can also change customer accounts domain from “yourdomain.com/account” to “account.yourdomain.com” In order to do that, it’s required to create a subdomain on the domain service provider account. Once you login to that account, go to the DNS settings and add a new record with following these field names below:
- Host: account
- Type: CNAME
- Alias data: shops.myshopify.com
The DNS update may take up to 24 hours, so the new subdomain won’t be accessible until that. I recommend to make this update in advance.
Step 2: Update to one-page checkout from three-page checkout
This is another new feature, some of the old Shopify stores might not be using yet, but it’s recommended to switch to the new version as the one-page checkout collects the same information from your customers as the current three-page. Moreover, it lets your customers enter and review their order details, shipping information, and payment details all on one page.
You can make this update on editor section by following these steps;
- From your Shopify admin, go to Settings > Checkout.
- In the Configurations section, click Customize next to the checkout configuration that you want to customize.
- In the checkout and accounts editor, click the gear icon to access the Settings sidebar.
- In the Checkout layout section, click the current layout to open the checkout layout options.
- Click One-page checkout or Three-page checkout to set the checkout layout.
- Click Save.
Step 3: Review your existing checkout customizations
Here is the beginning of checkout extensibility upgrade, please follow the guidelines:
- At Shopify admin, go to Settings > Checkout.
- In the Configuration or Upgrade to Checkout Extensibility section, click Review Customizations to open the report that contains information about existing customizations in your checkout, including the following data:
- Category of customization, such as Branding or Validations
- Customization name and description
- Source file, such as checkout.liquid
- Code lines where the customization starts and ends
- Guidance for creating the customization in Checkout Extensibility
In this report, you can find out all customizations on your “order status page additional scripts” that you need to set them up to be eligible with the new settings. Use apps to recreate customizations for your Thank you and Order status pages. You should create your custom apps or switch to other solutions if you have custom settings and you can follow their setup instructions to get started for apps that have been updated by the app developer.

Step 4: Create and publish new customizations
- From your Shopify admin, go to Settings > Checkout.
- In the Configurations section, click Create draft.
- Customize your checkout, Thank you and Order status pages by adding apps or editing your branding.
- Optional: Set up your Pixels or additional first party features.
- Review your changes.
- When you’re ready to use this new checkout, click Publish.
- In the pop-up window, choose which pages to publish and then confirm you want to replace any existing customizations by clicking publish.
If you don’t see any “Click Draft” button, no worries. You can simply publish “Thank you” and “Order status” pages in the editor after clicking “Customize” button and open checkout/editor to complete Checkout Extensibility upgrade.
If you need help for any steps above, feel free to reach out!